The start of the Spanish GP
Formula 1 will return to the track on Friday for the first free practice sessions and Sprint qualifying of the Austrian Grand Prix, marking the return to a weekend with the Sprint format for the first time since the Chinese GP. However, on the eve of the restart of the engines at the Red Bull Ring, there was no shortage of discussions relating to the last event held last Sunday in Spainstarting with Landon Norris. The Briton, who had won pole position in Barcelona and then finished the race in 2nd place, returned to analyze some aspects relating to the GP, starting with his start: “I think I was perhaps a little too critical in saying that I got off to a bad start – He admitted – I didn’t get a bad start, and even if my start had been decent, I think Russell would still have passed me. If I hadn’t been there, you would still have questioned Verstappen, because he was passed by George too, not just me. But it wasn’t George who determined whether he won or not, but Max and the fact that he was overtaken. Generally my starts have been very good and very consistent. Max made a tiny, tiny better one, and that little detail made the difference in terms of finishing positions.”
“Honestly, I think I was a little too critical – he added – if we had repeated the race, the result would easily have been different. There are so many areas during a race where things can go wrong. So I don’t think we need to overreact, as I said then, and after all the reviews we’ve done, I’m very happy with how we got through Turn 1, and also the reaction to Turn 1. I could have easily tried to be a hero and get by on the outside of Max, and that would have just caused an accident, and I would have ended up taking out George too, so I think I was smart to do that. And after Turn 2, everything went very well, including our strategy. I know we’ve gotten a lot of criticism about the strategy and things like that, but they were made by people who have no idea what they are talking about. So I’m very happy, 99.5%, just a couple of meters off the line cost me last weekend, but by the same token if it had been a shorter lap into Turn 1, it wouldn’t have made a difference.”
Work perfectly to win
Outside of the start aspect, Norris also analyzed other aspects, believing it possible to achieve victories during this season: “After analyzing last weekend, I don’t think we necessarily had a faster car than Red Bull. Most of the time I seemed faster than Max, thanks to my extended stints. Having a decent tire difference compared to him, I think I did 6 laps in the first part and 4 in the second, and in Barcelona it’s a big difference. It may only be 4 laps, and to those who don’t know it may not seem like anything, but 4 laps of tire delta compared to another car is an extreme difference in terms of lap time. It was actually the time difference between what Max did and what I did, not that mine was faster in terms of laps. So I think this shows that we had a good strategy, that we looked much faster and that I was catching Max, and after being behind George in the first stint until the end of the race, I caught Max, but didn’t beat him. So at the same time, I was very happy to say that I only had to fix little things and that as a team we need to do a little better job, but a lot of things were at the necessary level.”
“We could win some races, I think it’s possible for how the team is behaving, for how I have behaved so far, but we are against one of the best Formula 1 drivers ever, one of the best performing teams in Formula 1. And then all the others, apart from this one, can easily come into play, so everything must be done to perfectionand last weekend it wasn’t executed perfectly.”
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